


On the Tenth Minute of Christmas Cookies, My Guitarist Gave To Me

by revolutionator



Category: BanG Dream! Girl's Band Party! (Video Game)
Genre: Christmas Cookies, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 18:26:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17146814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/revolutionator/pseuds/revolutionator
Summary: One date proposal...? Misaki and Kaoru bake cookies together and share a little moment of closeness. For the Bandori Secret Santa Exchange on Twitter!





	On the Tenth Minute of Christmas Cookies, My Guitarist Gave To Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [@KaoMLsa on Twitter](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=%40KaoMLsa+on+Twitter).



> Dear recipient, I really hope you like this! I mis-read your prompt at first but managed to make it work somehow. I hope this makes your Christmas feel a little cosier and you have a great holiday!

“Did you know,” Kaoru was saying, “that in Shakespeare’s time, Christmas lasted for twelve days? Can you imagine! Twelve days!”

“I bet all those Englishmen ran out of fried chicken for months afterwards,” Misaki muttered, but she wasn’t really listening. The one advantage of coming over to Kokoro’s house was getting to utilize all of her ridiculous amenities, and right now it was prime Christmas cookie time. Misaki had a little sister at home who would appreciate iced cookies more than anybody, and the Tsurumaki oven was the perfect place to make that happen. She went back to her canvas bag to retrieve the ingredients she’d bought on the way.

“Do you really think they ate it every day?” Kaoru propped herself up against the kitchen island and then hitched her hips up, so she could perch on the edge. “I’d think they’d get frightfully bored of the same thing every day… And besides, when would there be time to eat suckling pig, or roast potatoes, or all the other things they talk about? But then… To eat something as decadent as fried chicken for almost two weeks…! Ah, the ephemeral hedonism…!”

Misaki set out the flour, the sugar, the baking powder. There was a little package of colored fondant icing in tubes, a small container of sprinkles, and a sachet of silver balls. She lined them up and then opened each container in turn.

As she turned to get one of the Tsurumaki family’s gigantic mixing bowls, she nearly walked right into Kaoru, who had hopped down from the island and was now stood peering at her ingredients.

“Misaki, what is this that you’re concocting?”

“Concocting,” Misaki repeated disbelievingly. “It’s…It’s cookies, Kaoru. Have you never made cookies before?”

Kaoru stayed quiet for just a fraction of a second too long. Misaki was starting to learn what that meant, when it came to Kaoru – it meant she was crafting a lie to cover for something that she might think make her look uncool. She could interrupt her, but it almost seemed kinder to let her hoist herself by her own petard.

“Of course I have! Why, I appreciate cookies deeply…Especially the ones made by Imai-san from the dance club… Of course I recognize cookie ingredients! Would you require any assistance with your cookiework, my dearest kitten?”

Misaki liberated a huge, butter-yellow mixing bowl from one of the cupboards, from a stack of ten identical ones. There were so many shelves in this kitchen, so many drawers and hidden compartments stuffed to the brim with utensils and piled plates and unplugged devices that she didn’t even recognize. And hadn’t Kokoro mentioned something offhand about having more than one kitchen? Ridiculous.

“Well, if you wanted to help me find where the mixing spoons were…”

“I can do that!”

Kaoru heroically set off on her own quest around the kitchen, long cardigan billowing out behind her like an adventurer’s cape. It took a good five minutes for her to find a silicone spoon, and another five on top of that to find the greasing paper, rolling pin and baking tray that Misaki sent her to find.

Then she continued to sit with her elbows on the counter, watching Misaki mix. It made her feel a little self-conscious.

“You’re very talented, aren’t you Misaki?”

Well, she hadn’t been expecting that. Misaki nearly spluttered into the bowl and ruined the mixture, but thankfully turned her head away in the nick of time.

“I..I wouldn’t say so…?”

Kaoru looked at her with grave seriousness. Her arms were folded on the counter now. “You can cook, bake, sew. You renege with Michelle for us all the time, you interpret Kokoro’s songs and transcribe them for all of us to understand. And your bravery…!”

Misaki hugged the mixing bowl to her chest like it was a protective shield. She was faintly aware that her face was turning red.

“Y-Yeah, well, I mean, you could…You could say that stuff just as easily about you, or Kanon-senpai, or Hagumi, or even Kokoro…”

“Every one of us fantastic and talented people in our own right! But I wasn’t complimenting any of those individuals, was I? I was complimenting you.”

Misaki started mixing with even more passion as though in hope it might drown Kaoru out. Her ears felt like they were burning. Why did Kaoru have to be like this? She could handle Kokoro’s well-intentioned ignorance and even Hagumi’s baffling internal logic, but Kaoru was another creature entirely. Misaki could never quite put her finger on whether Kaoru meant what she was saying, or how much of it she really understood. The latter was much less of a sure thing than the former, that was all she could count on.

“Thanks,” she managed to spit out after an awkward silence.

Kaoru was busying herself with the baking tray, cutting the greaseproof paper to perfect size and then tucking it into the tray with delicate care.

“After you mix it,” Kaoru asked once she was finished preparing the tray, “what do you do after that?”

Misaki sent her a sidelong glance. “You’re asking even though you’ve made them before?”

“Indulge me.”

Something about the pensive look in Kaoru’s face made Misaki relent. She folded over the mixture one more time for good measure then set it to the side.

“Pass me the flour?”

Kaoru did, and her eyes lit up as she did so. Misaki took a pinch of flour and dusted the counter-top with it, sprinkling a good square area in fine white powder. Kaoru clucked her tongue and nodded like a wildlife expert watching rare koalas feed.

“It’s so the dough doesn’t stick,” Misaki said, feeling ridiculous. “We can roll it out like this…”

She scooped the mixture out where it flopped in a dramatic glob on the counter top. Kaoru applauded it. Misaki didn’t really think it deserved applause. She would have given it a 6.0 at a poolside dive competition.

“And then roll it out,” she continued. “Rolling pin, please.”

Even with this entire charade being ridiculous, she was starting to get into the groove of narrating everything aloud to Kaoru. She hadn’t expected her to be such a captive audience. Also, whenever Misaki requested something of her she just handed it over without any issue.

She rolled the dough out and then cautiously offered Kaoru some of the cookie-cutter shapes she’d found in an unrelated drawer. She stepped back to give her access to the sheet of dough and witnessed as Kaoru bent over with meticulous care, finding the perfect place to position a star shape and then pressing it down, wiggling it gently until it came loose.

After three different shapes, each wiggled free with such extreme concentration that Kaoru’s tongue started to creep out from between her lips, Misaki realized the most damning thing so far: this was _cute_. Kaoru was being _cute_.

“There,” she declared, straightening up. “Of course, I wish we had some moon shapes too…The fleeting sight of the night sky is a perfect canvas for Christmas cookies, don’t you think, Misaki?”

“Sure,” said Misaki.

She set about cutting the rest of the shapes herself, still reeling from this most recent revelation. Kaoru wasn’t cute. Was she? Okay, she was attractive, that was a known objective fact, but that was different to being cute. Cute meant all kinds of other things. It meant things in itself just to think someone else was cute in that soft, vulnerable way, and none of those things were good.

Cookies. She had cookies to make.

“So what was that you were saying,” she asked urgently. “Twelve days of Christmas? That’s a lot of days.”

A desperate measure, but maybe if Kaoru got back on her weirdo track of talking about nonsense it might null the weird tender feeling in Misaki’s chest. Kaoru looked wrong-footed for a moment but immediately brightened.

“Oh, yes! There’s actually a song about it, though it’s entirely in English, and I only know an approximation-“

“Wonderful,” Misaki garbled while arranging the cookie shapes on the sheet. “Maybe you can just say the approximation, then.”

Kaoru proceeded to do exactly that, in very serious, grave Japanese that was apparently meant to emulate the olden way of English. Misaki shoved the cookies into the oven and slammed the door shut. She hoped everything would turn out okay. This oven was leagues away from the tiny microwave-oven on top of her parents’ fridge; they might as well be different appliances.

“And a partridge in a pear tree – so many birds, did you notice? I’m not really sure what makes a partridge different from a pigeon, or even so different from a hen that you’d need an extra one after three of them, plus the two turtle-doves, which are…I think…pigeons as well…? Anyway, birds aside-“

Kaoru paused from this passionate monologue to sniff theatrically at the air. Come to think of it, she did most things theatrically, but this was very over-the-top even for her.

“Oh, Misaki,” she gushed, eyes lit up like freshly-lit candles, “it smells divine in here!”

She practically danced over to the oven and crouched in front of it, all one hundred and seventy centimeters of her compressing suddenly down to less than half of that. She made a motion as though to press her fingers against the glass, but something – maybe the tiny hiss of warning Misaki made through her teeth, or just the sense of heat even before she drew close – made her draw her hands back and just press them to the tops of her thighs.

“They look so inviting. How many did you make?”

Misaki crouched down next to her, squinting through her lanky bangs. She had made… However much there was to make. She counted them through the glass and lost her place, then counted again. “I guess about twenty? That mix made way more than I expected it to…”

“Are they all for your sister?”

Kaoru’s question was suspiciously casual. Misaki stopped squinting at the cookies so she could squint at her instead.

“You’re going to get one,” she said.

“Oh!” Kaoru put her hand to her mouth. “I didn’t mean to impose-“

“Kaoru-san, you’re my bandmate. It’s not imposing.”

“You’re such a kind girl, Misaki,” Kaoru told her. Misaki felt her heart tighten in her chest like an elastic band being pulled too tight. “Why, the only thing that outmatches your kindness is your-“

Misaki was surprised by her own audacity in the next couple of seconds, where she put her hand out and pressed her fingers to Kaoru’s lips. She just knew somehow that Kaoru was going to say something gaudy and phoney, like, that her beauty was the most striking thing about her, or the limpid pools of her eyes, or her devotion to Hello, Happy World, or something like that. It was suddenly unbearable in this tiny, precious world that had been conjured up in Kokoro’s kitchen.

“Kaoru-san,” Misaki started, then lost her confidence completely. The startled expression on Kaoru’s face had given way to a smile, and that had undone all her convictions to tell her off. “Kaoru-san, you have to be more responsible with how you talk to people.”

“Oh?”

“Because you make people fall in love with you,” she grunted.

“But my dear, that is my goal. It is every actor’s goal. We weave fantasies that others may live in them, and then-”

“I don’t like the fantasy,” Misaki interrupted, “I like…You. I just like you. And I don’t like when you lie to me. I really, really like it when you tell the truth, even when you tell it in stupid ways, or with weird gestures, or like that one time when I got so upset with everyone over getting left out, you were so kind…”

Her voice cracked and died in her throat. Kaoru was looking at her helplessly. Then she smiled again, even warmer than the gentle heat radiating out from the oven, and opened her arms to beckon Misaki into them – hard as it was to shuffle into her while squatting, she managed it somehow.

When Kaoru had gotten her fill of hugging, she let go. She gave a little nod towards the oven, which Misaki reciprocated, because her legs were starting to feel numb and the cookies would need taking out soon. She felt overheated and very silly.

Misaki wouldn’t even look at Kaoru for the rest of the preparation process, although she was dimly aware of her decorating cookies alongside her (“May I?” “Wh-Yeah, yeah, sure, whatever.”). It was as though her brain had overloaded with sheer embarrassment and had to reboot to be capable of thought again.

“Sorry,” she said halfway through icing a snowman. “That was rude and out of nowhere and-“

Kaoru thrust a cookie into her face so quickly it was impossible to continue. It was one of the stars she’d cut herself, edged in white icing, with the kanji 儚 written in pink and lined with blue.

 “Allow me to bring your fantasy into reality,” Kaoru announced. “Misaki Okusawa! I am presenting this cookie…that, er, you yourself baked…but that I decorated! As a token of my appreciation, and I would love to be your date for Christmas!”

Misaki blinked at her.

Then in spite of herself, she giggled. It was a weird sound coming out of her mouth, but not unwelcome.

“Cool,” she said, enjoying the moment of tense hesitation in Kaoru’s eyes before she spoke. She split the cookie in half and passed it back to her. “Want to feed the birds at the park?”

“Oh…Well, that’s a lovely idea. Yes, let’s do that. I didn’t know you liked birds, Misaki…?”

Misaki bit into her half of the cookie and felt the sugar spread across her tongue, sweet and genuine and undeniable. “I guess maybe that old Shakespearean song inspired me or something. We can see if we can spot any partridges.”

Glancing across at Kaoru she saw she’d made her blush. What a nice feeling that was. Maybe that was why Kaoru liked to make girls do it so much? Well, that was a dangerous line of thought to take up.

“Happy Christmas,” she told Kaoru, popping the rest of the cookie into her mouth. She almost spat it out again when Kaoru kissed her on the cheek. Then she had the nerve to wink at her and exit the room with half of the cookies.

She folded her arms and watched the door her future Christmas date had just left through, and let herself grin. She was blushing again. Maybe it was best to leave that stuff to professionals like Kaoru.

Misaki had her hands full with all the things she’d brought up earlier, after all.


End file.
